They're doing the 007 days of christmas on TNN. Showing the same movies that they showed last month. In their 007 days of christmas preview commercials they show a scene from The Living Daylights.

Why TNN? Why do you torture me with the promise of the Dalton Bonds, and not show them? Why do you torment me by showing me a well acted, well scripted Bond, and then throw "The Man With The Golden Gun" on the tube for 3 hours? How many times can one network show "Thunderball"? Well, given that this is the same network that's beating Star Trek: The Next Generation into the ground, the last question is unnecessary.

A while ago I got a Sharp Zaurus, which I really wanted to use as my PDA. The thing rocked. Thumbboard, it played mp3s, full color, slots and cards.

And at Dimstar, this was fine. I really didn't use it for anything other than keeping reminders, and playing MP3s. I didn't mind the short battery life, because I really didn't use it all that much. I didn't care that it handled Word and Excel at a barely acceptable level, because I didn't really use it that much.

But at the New Place, battery life became a concern. So did the Word and Excel (more Word really) capabilities. People often send me documents, and my prefered time for reading them is when I have a free moment. Which is usually 5 minutes before a meeting, in a conference room or strange office. And I usually only have the PDA available. And because I'm using it, the batteries tend to drain faster. So I wasn't digging the Zaurus.

For some reason, I pulled out the Revo+. I remembered it had pretty good battery life, and it was decent with Word and Excel.

I didn't remember the half of it. It does Word and Excel better than a PocketPC. The irony is rich there. And I only have to charge it once a week, which makes me much happier than the Zaurus's once a day charging ritual. It doesn't do MP3s. It only has a 16 greyscale screen. But the screen is more readable than any Palm I've ever seen (greyscale palms). And the alarm is loud enough to wake me from two rooms away. When it's in a bookbag. In a carrying case. It's that loud.

And it does the little things right. One thing that's always puzzled me on the PocketPC and Zaurus is the menubar. Why the hell did they stick one there? It only takes up valuable screen real estate. Psion and Palm got it right when they decided to hide the menubar and show it when you hit a button. Ditto for memory usage. On the Psion and Palm, you just don't worry about it. On the PocketPC you have to set aside memory for storage, and some for programs. Just like MacOS. Version 7. From 1994.

On the Psion, I hit a button, and a program loads. It's just fast. And it's only got a 33mhz processor. I will give it to the PocketPC folks tho. They are getting faster. The new ones with the 400mhz processor are nearly as fast as my Psion. There may be a little bloat in the PocketPC OS, but who am I to make that call?

So the Zaurus has gone into retirement, replaced by the older, yet more usable, Revo+. I loaded up Opera and nConvert onto the Revo, and a few games for those boring moments, and I'm pretty set.

Man I missed geeking out on stuff like this. It's good to be back.